Crazy Blogger Uncovers Evil Sexist Plot

The web advertising bubble is out of control, right?

Anyone who looks at the facts about web advertising has to conclude that while there are some people who know what they're doing, most web advertisers might as well stand on the roof and make paper airplanes out of thousand dollar bills.

So the other night I had a thought.

What if this whole web advertising thing is a big, fat sexist

Social Media Guru Disses Social Media Gurus

You can put this in your "You Can't Make This Shit Up" file.

Here we have a a social media guru sitting beach side in Cannes -- at her fabulous corporate cafe -- talking shit about social media gurus.

She tells us that social media gurus are full of crap, then she goes on to give a tour de force performance in impenetrable, incomprehensible social media gibberish...
"...interface and

Just Wait, You'll See

Here at Ad Contrarian World Headquarters, we've been at war with the "new age" advertising crowd for almost 3 years now.

They still can't understand the distinction between the popularity of the web and the dismal record of web advertising. They think that because the internet has become pervasive, internet advertising must be similarly powerful.

They are wrong.

We all learned to ignore banner

Nielsen Buries The Lead

The advertising industry is so intent on pumping up (some might say pimping up) web and mobile video, they can't even see the real world anymore.

Nielsen's "Three Screen Report" (which reports on TV, web, and mobile screen usage) for the first quarter of 2010 has some astounding data about viewing habits. But you'd never know it from reading their conclusions.

Here are the facts I found

How To Be Fabulously Successful

People often say to me, "Ad Contrarian, how can I be a fabulously successful online copywriter like you?"

Well, I'm here to tell you that you, too, can be famous and make millions of dollars and have super-hot nymphos crawling all over you.

What's the secret to online copywriting success? First, you need some words. Words are the building blocks of writing! Without words, writing is a

Why Clients Are Always Confused

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called "Why Creatives Are Always Confused." Today, it's clients' turn.

I have been in the advertising business now for about 200 years.

One of my quests while serving this lengthy sentence has been to try to find some universal truths about advertising. So far I've come up empty.

If someone like me -- who spends 14 hours a day thinking about advertising -- is

The Value Of A Customer's Hat

Yesterday, we talked about my problems with a study called The Value Of A Facebook Fan: An Empirical Review produced by a company called Syncapse. It purported to calculate a value for Facebook fanhood. Today we'll discuss another problem with the study.
 
After 18 pages of charts and graphs and marketing babble that occasionally resembles English, Syncapse concludes that the average

The Value Of A Facebook Fan

This weekend I had the misfortune of reading a mind-numbing piece of work called "The Value Of A Facebook Fan: An Empirical Review" by a company called Syncapse.

I knew this report would be a lot of bluff and bananas when I saw the word "empirical" in the title.

Syncapse modestly describes itself as "a global leader in the areas of community building, technology solutions, and digital

Advertising Is A Good History Teacher

Advertising is a good history teacher.

One of the lessons our teachers and history professors always try to impress on us -- usually fruitlessly -- is that it is very tricky to judge the past by applying contemporary standards.

Advertising teaches this wonderfully.

A few days ago, one of my readers (CaliforniaGirl) sent a link to a post she had written.

The post was about past ads that

Social Mediocrity

As regular readers know, there are few things that make me more cheerful and insufferably smug than sticking pins in pathetic social media schemes.

Earlier this week, The New York Times ran a big story in their "Media and Advertising" section about a product for arthritic baby boomers called Elations. The story devoted a good deal of space to a social media program that Elations is engaged in.

A CMO I Can Love

It's rare that I read something in a trade publication written by a cmo that isn't a cliche-riddled jargon fest.

This week, however, I read a brief interview with Rick Bendel who is international chief marketing officer for Walmart in AdAge. In spite of his alarming title, he had some intelligent things to say that echo a post I wrote almost a year ago called "The Laziness of Global Advertisers

Pepsi Proves You Can Give Away Money

I know I'm like totally old school and out of it and a big old dinosaur, but I thought marketing was supposed to be about selling stuff. Silly me.

So wasn't I all red-in-the-face and feeling like a dork when I read an interview in BrandWeek with Pepsi's marketing director. The interview was about their much ballyhooed "Refresh Project" -- which, in my churlish opinion is a big cynical gimmick to

Let The Hysteria Begin

Well, it didn't take long.

Last Wednesday, in a post called The Amazing Social Media Swindle I wrote,
"The good news is that pretty soon social media marketing hysteria will go the way of podcasts and widgets, and we can all get hysterical about iAds." For once, I was prescient. Within 24 hours, the Wall Street Journal ran a headline story called "Apple's Next Disruption: Advertising."

Just

The Consumer Knows Nothing

There was a time when advertisers weren't afraid to make decisions. They would trust their judgment. They wouldn't be too timid to have an opinion.

Unfortunately, those days are gone. Now, every creative decision is made by "the consumer"-- i.e., research.

This would be fine if there was a reliable research methodology to determine advertising effectiveness. But there isn't. I've been

Advertising's Degenerative Disease

Last week, Apple surpassed Microsoft as the world's most valuable technology company.

I've never done work for either of these firms, but they seem so different to me it's hard to think of them as being in the same business.

I was trying to understand what made them feel so dissimilar to me. I think it's craftsmanship.

It seems to me that Microsoft is a company run by a businessman. Apple is a

The Amazing Social Media Swindle

If you need any further evidence of the insane hysteria the marketing industry has created around social media marketing, a very clever bit of research from Nation's Restaurant News ought to do the trick.

The magazine asked consumers and restaurant operators parallel questions about their use of social media (specifically Facebook and Twitter.) As they say, "...what we found was nothing

Philosophy Or Donuts?

Several years ago, a very sincere guy who ran a chain of donut shops came to see me. He wanted to do an advertising campaign.

"We're different," he explained. "We're a commune. Everyone who works here owns an equal part. We work cooperatively. It's a model for how businesses should be run. It's a vision of the future. I think we should do an ad campaign about it. I think people will really

Unreasonable People

One of the things web publishers are going to have to get used to is human irrationality.

This can be seen in the worldwide fuss over Facebook, Google and privacy.

Apologists point out that people put their most intimate details on the web and then get all huffy when publishers like Facebook and Google provide access to this information. Isn't this complete hypocrisy, they say?

Darn right

A Whole Lot Of Nothing

We think we're important.

We think our problems are monumental.

We have massive frustrations and grievances.

So I thought a little perspective might help us all have a nicer weekend.

First of all, let's talk about this place we live in.

We call it the universe. We've all heard about the hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars, each surrounded by who

Maniacs With Thin Skins

“He irritates the fuck out of me. He’s got carried away with his own scepticism about the internet and it’s become a self-fulfilling prophesy.” Another blogger, on the subject of yours truly.
The fun thing about being The Ad Contrarian is that it's my job is to stick my finger in the eye of conventional advertising wisdom.

Since conventional advertising wisdom is so, well, conventional, and

Why I Never Make Predictions

Diligent readers of this blog have probably noticed that the wily ol' Ad Contrarian almost never makes predictions.

The reason for this is simple: I hate looking like an idiot.

People who make predictions are almost always wrong, and usually wind up eating their words.

Here's a lovely case in point. I was going through some old stuff about the supposed "death of advertising" and came upon this

The Yellow And Brown Process

Clients love to believe that there is a method to the advertising madness.

A substantial component of success at winning new business these days is not about the effectiveness of the advertising you create, but how clever you are at contriving a plausible sounding process for developing your ideas.

There are processes for doing just about everything an agency does. But when it comes to